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Spotlight and Finder search not working

GGJstudios

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,545
943
Rauweham said:
Hi,
I had a malfunctioning Spotlight.
After zapping the PRAM, it seems to work again.
Click to expand...
PRAM/NVRAM has nothing to do with Spotlight. Resetting it will not help. What probably helped is you restarting your Mac, with or without resetting NVRAM.
If Spotlight isn't working properly, try re-indexing your drive:
If that fails to index, enter the following command in Terminal:
sudo mdutil -i on "/Volumes/your drive name"​
 
M

MatteWhite

macrumors newbie
Mar 13, 2013
1
0
I had the same problem, it all resolved itself when I turned off the mouse keys accessibility function. :)
 
M

mnanda

macrumors newbie
Oct 6, 2009
7
0
This solved my problem!

djladoo said:
Hey there,
I was having this same problem on my MPB in Lion. Tried reindexing, repairing permissions, made a new user....nothing. Then I tried try this:

Boot to Lion’s recovery partition by holding “Command-R” at startup (or holding Alt/Option and selecting the recovery partition from the boot menu). Then, from the Utilities menu, choose Terminal. Type “resetpassword” into Terminal and hit Return. This launches the Reset Password menu. From here, select root (I also did users) and select "reset home folder permissions and ACLs"

Once I restarted, spotlight did a reindex again and then....VOILA!

Good Luck!

Hope this was useful!
Click to expand...

Thank you, this totally solved my problem!
 
D

djmannyblaze

macrumors newbie
Dec 4, 2013
1
0
This worked for me 100%

*MY SOLUTION*


You might need to reindex for Spotlight to get back working again.

The easiest way to do this is to open the Spotlight Preference Pane in System Preferences, and go to the Privacy tabs. Add your hard drive(s) to that tab, then remove them. That forces Spotlight to reindex. The reindex takes time, but it's worth it

*MY SOLUTION*

LET ME KNOW IF IT WORKED FOR YOU GUYS
 
H

hdtech24

macrumors newbie
Dec 31, 2013
1
0
My solution

The situation I had, was where I could not click on the spotlight search for whatever reason. What made it work for me was opening it one time with the hotkey for spotlight search (mac button + spacebar) then it opened, and I am not able to click on it when I go to it and click on it. Hope this helps? Thanks. :apple:
 
GGJstudios

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,545
943
djmannyblaze said:
You might need to reindex for Spotlight to get back working again.
Click to expand...
If you took the time to read the thread, you'd know that solution was posted over a year ago, and over 2 years ago the OP stated in the first post that they had re-indexed drive.
hdtech24 said:
The situation I had, was where I could not click on the spotlight search for whatever reason. What made it work for me was opening it one time with the hotkey for spotlight search (mac button + spacebar) then it opened, and I am not able to click on it when I go to it and click on it. Hope this helps? Thanks. :apple:
Click to expand...
That's not the issue being discussed here. The issue is that the search results aren't revealing all that should be revealed.
 
F

filriyadh

macrumors newbie
Sep 26, 2012
6
0
found this worked for me

Honestly, I simply typed 'reset' without the apostrophies in the Terminal (from Utilities) and it worked for me. Using 10.8 though
 
S

Smoothjunk

macrumors newbie
Oct 5, 2014
1
0
Fixed!

I've been having this problem for a few weeks.

Running the command "sudo killall mds" in Terminal worked perfectly for me.

I'd try this fast and easy fix first if you're experiencing the same issue.
 
S

softgoodsint

macrumors newbie
Dec 12, 2012
5
0
eternalife said:
Download Alfred and use it instead. It's the best search/launcher/everything out there.
Click to expand...

Ah, thank you 'eternalize' - I will seek out 'Alfred' and 'retire' spotlight to a very dark corner. I was/am appalled. I would have, let's say "xyz123" in a document, and spotlight would find it if I searched "xyz", but if I searched for 'xyz1" or 'xyz12', it would not find it, but then it might find it when I searched on 'xyz123'. Am I being too harsh to call such a utility, Spotlight, a POS, if it behaves that way?
 
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